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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29319684">last night i had a dream</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/shortcrust/pseuds/shortcrust'>shortcrust</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Cobra Kai (Web Series), Karate Kid (Movies)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon But A Little To The Left, Fluff and Humor, M/M, Slice of Life, Vignettes</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 02:09:21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>19,416</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29319684</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/shortcrust/pseuds/shortcrust</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, <em>or</em>, moments in the life of Johnny Lawrence, a man who married the guy who kicked him in the face then jerked him off at senior prom.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Background Carmen Diaz/Amanda LaRusso, Daniel LaRusso/Johnny Lawrence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>111</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>288</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>last night i had a dream</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>At this point in time more of Johnny’s life has sucked than not and he has elected to deal with that by not dealing with it in the slightest. For the record he is, like. Aware. He’s not a complete idiot. People tend to assume Johnny is dumb because he’s blonde and hot but he does actually do things on purpose. One of those things is to be cool and another is to be a badass.</p><p>It’s perfect. It’s flawless. His life is a big shiny diamond, the rock on a gaudy wedding band, and the second he watches Kreese try to twist Bobby into something unrecognisable the cracks started creeping through it. Then he’s told to sweep the leg and it shatters, and all the pieces look like broken safety glass.</p><p>Mrs. Brown gives him a lift home - Johnny’s mom is out of town at a function she couldn’t move, which had bummed him out until this morning but which he was now pathetically grateful for - and he sits quietly in the back kinda trying to piece his identity together again but mostly just staring at his shoes.</p><p>“Hey,” Bobby whispers from the other seat. The radio is on some fuzzy Christian rock station but he pitches his voice low. “We should apologize.”</p><p>Johnny picks at the congealing cuts on his hands for a moment then says, “Yeah,” and then, “maybe.”</p><p>Bobby nods, hair flopping. He’s so earnest. Why does Johnny have to be friends with good people? They make him look shit by comparison. “At school, on monday.”</p><p>At school, on monday, LaRusso limps around on a set of crutches. When Bobby frogmarches them over to the dude’s locker he spins and takes out Johnny at the ankle.</p><p>“Okay,” Johnny grits his teeth. “That’s fair.”</p><p>LaRusso starts to stammer out an apology, then seems to decide that on second thought he doesn’t actually want to give one.</p><p>Bobby picks up the slack. “I - <em>we</em>,” he corrects, “wanted to say sorry.”</p><p>LaRusso shifts his weight from foot to foot. After a second, he asks, “For the tournament?” He says the words looking at Bobby, but then his gaze slides sideways.</p><p>He’s got these eyes, big brown ones, that apparently have the power to just disintegrate all of Johnny’s impulse control. He feels like he’s being seen, not like he wants to be but how he actually is, perfectly made out of propped up bits stuck together trying to be a person. It drives him nuts - but maybe that isn't entirely LaRusso’s fault.</p><p>“For everything,” Johnny says, and tries to at least act like he means it.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>Unfortunately, LaRusso makes Johnny into an insane person.</p><p>For the remaining six months of the school year he struts around with Ali on his arm, her pack of girls at his back like they’re all going to go pillow fight and braid each other’s hair later. He’s not in any of Johnny’s classes, which is probably for the best else he’d likely be failing worse than he currently already is, but whenever they’re within a fifty foot radius of each other on the sports field or in the hallway it’s like some kind of proximity alarm goes off in his brain.</p><p>Bobby gets it. Or at least, he seems to, because he just nods with serene patience every time Johnny collapses onto their table and bitches for the entire lunch period. He respects the weird extra layer of kinship they’ve gained. To strike like a cobra you gotta know what you’re hitting; no doubt, no hesitation. It only takes a moment to stop knowing and then whole thing goes directly to shit when you need to strike at a kid who might not be fighting better than you but who is definitely fighting <em>better </em>than you. Bobby seems to feel how he does about getting told to beat up someone super annoying but in what is like, a not cool way. The energy has to go somewhere.</p><p>Dutch, on the other hand, is rapidly devolving into a little psychopath. Johnny thought he was taking the high road not trying to beat the crap out of LaRusso anymore. He didn’t think he’d have to try and convince <em>other </em>people not to. That’s really starting to ask too much of him, man.</p><p>“I say we take it,” Dutch tries to rally them, one period when they’ve all blown off class.</p><p>The ‘it’ in question is the watch LaRusso came into school wearing the day after winter break. He keeps his sleeves rolled up all the time, showing the thing off.</p><p>Johnny tries to shrug it off. “He’s not worth it, man.”</p><p>“Doubt the watch is worth it either.” Tommy, coming in with the assist.</p><p>Regardless, Dutch resolves to jump him after school tomorrow. Totally unrelatedly, Johnny chooses to pass over both the car and the motorbike that day to hitch a ride with his mom. They stop on the way and get cheap breakfast burritos from this old hole-in-the-wall.</p><p>After school, he ducks out of English early so that none of the others see him lingering by the bicycle racks. He leans up against a wall, props the sole of one sneaker up on the brick behind his back and attempts to look more nonchalant than he feels.</p><p>LaRusso rolls out not long after the bell rings, and - yup, there he goes, trailing alongside Suzie and Janet and all of their other high-pitched friends. Johnny knows this dance, did his half of it for a couple of months when he was trying to convince Ali to go out with him. They’ll all wheel their bikes and gossip about nail polish or whatever until one by one they hit their turn home and pedal off. Then it’ll be just LaRusso, heading towards the shitty side of town. Johnny watches all this from twenty paces back.</p><p>Only, the moment after the ginger girl who is in Math with him whose name he never bothered learning dips, LaRusso stops dead in the middle of the sidewalk.</p><p>He shouts, without turning around.</p><p>“Stop following me.”</p><p>Johnny closes the distance at a stroll. “What if I’m just headed the same direction?” When he eventually draws up alongside, LaRusso makes a face that suggests he has correctly assessed the likelihood of them ever headed to the same place as being pretty low.</p><p>“What,” asks LaRusso, eyebrows high and sceptical. “You tryna walk me home?”</p><p>Johnny doesn’t reply, just sticks his hands in his pockets and carries on walking. He fills the silence while LaRusso wheels his bike around by humming that old Fats Domino song to himself.</p><p>LaRusso doesn’t say anything either until they go to turn off Vanowen. “I live this way,” he instructs for some reason, twisting the handlebars on his shitty six-speed.</p><p>“I know.”</p><p>“Yeah,” he counters. “From that time you stalked me and pushed me off a cliff.”</p><p>“Don’t be dramatic,” dismisses Johnny. “It was a hill.” LaRusso bristles, and they bicker the whole rest of the way to <em>South Seas</em>.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>“Hey,” Johnny asks, the third day in a row they do this. On god, Dutch has better start getting bored soon. He shouldn’t be able to hold a thought in his head that long, all the peroxide bleach soaking down into his brain matter. “What’s so special with the watch anyway?”</p><p>So, he’s curious. Sue him.</p><p>For reasons he can’t fathom, LaRusso answers. Guess you kind of power through some of the walls of social awkwardness when your heel has been up in someone’s sinuses. “It was my dad’s.”</p><p>“What, he not need it anymore?”</p><p>LaRusso lets out a single laugh, a yapping dog, then looks startled that he did. “No,” he says, face strange. “No, he doesn’t.”</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>Johnny doesn’t quit the dojo in Bobby’s dramatic fashion, but he doesn’t go back. Sid loses his shit but for even less of a good reason than usual. Cobra Kai gave him karate, but stopping doesn’t take it away again. It’s fine. Some of the guys get the idea to practice in the park on weekends which - kinda weird, sparring in public, but he’s got no problem with showing off. No problem, that is, until the new geiger counter in his skull starts a-tick-tick-ticking and he looks across the way and yup, there they are, sitting all pretty by the big fountain.</p><p>They perch there for an hour and only walk past when everyone votes they call it quits, pulling off sweaty tanks and upending water bottles over each other’s heads. Weird timing.</p><p>Johnny peels off his shirt, wipes his face with it. Ali and LaRusso make twin grimaces. He loops the shirt around the back of his neck, tugs on the two ends.</p><p>“Come back tomorrow,” he grins. “If you wanna learn how it’s done.”</p><p>He’s not fucking around. It’s a serious offer - at the <em>All Valley</em>, LaRusso came at him in a way Johnny wasn’t prepared for and in return he got his ass handed to him. He’d have to be a total moron to pass on the chance to figure out why. His tactic is to infiltrate and study the enemy, which is quickly foiled when LaRusso shows up with two neatly wrapped roast beef sandwiches.</p><p>“I said I was meeting a friend,” says LaRusso, briefly employing the gift of prophecy, “because it was easier to explain. She made extra.”</p><p>He waggles the sandwich. Johnny takes it.</p><p>Mrs. LaRusso - <em>call me Lucille</em> - does learn about him sooner rather than later. Turns out LaRusso was a baby about it for no reason. Either she doesn’t know much about how karate tournaments work or she doesn’t know much about all the other stuff or she’s just really cool. Johnny’s not sure which and he ain’t gonna press the advantage.</p><p>One time she gets home from work while they’re still stood outside the apartment block arguing. Saying she pulls up is a generous description of the motion the car actually performs.</p><p>“Why don’t you invite your friend in?” she asks, hands scrabbling in her bag. Looking, presumably, for a set of the keys which in the half an hour they’ve been dissecting their disparate preferences on everything from music to burger toppings LaRusso has not made the slightest suggestion of retrieving.</p><p>LaRusso crosses his arms, bike leaning against his hip. “We’re not meant to have animals in the apartment.”</p><p>Lucille finally extracts her prize and looks him up and down with a calculating eye. “You’re the boy from the Tournament.”</p><p>He gulps, big and loud, like he’s goddamn Scooby Doo. “Yes ma’am.”</p><p>She and LaRusso then proceed to have an entire silent conversation merely though making eyebrow shapes at each other. Afterwards she turns to Johnny and remarks, “You’re very blonde,” like it means something.</p><p>LaRusso groans, pained, and starts to lock his bike up.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>So after all that but before the rest of it, this is how it really starts: two teenagers, angry at the world but not necessarily at each other, a six-pack of beer, and the space behind the bleachers while music from senior prom creeps muffled out the gym doors.</p><p>Johnny pulls his mouth away from LaRusso’s, wet and shining in the dark. “You really think this is a good idea?”</p><p>It will eventually be lost to time that he is the one who asks this. Daniel’s response probably will be, too.</p><p>“Shut up,” he mumbles, and reaches for the front of his pants.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>It’s a week after the dance when his mom shouts, “Johnny! Phone for you.” By the time he picks up the receiver, there’s a dumb Jersey accent already running at a mile a minute.</p><p>“I got bad news and good news,” LaRusso opens with zero preamble. “Bad news is that I’m going with Mr Miyagi to Okinawa! It’s gonna be awesome, I’m so excited.”</p><p>Johnny decides not to question most of this situation. He picks a battle. “That’s bad because...?</p><p>“Well because I won’t get to blow your mind again. Obviously.”</p><p>Johnny’s cheeks flush with heat. He looks over his shoulder; his mom is still by the stove. He tries to fight his voice back into nonchalance. “And if that’s not the good news?”</p><p>“Jackass,” LaRusso comments, cheerful. “You said you were looking for a summer job, right?”</p><p>Lucille works for some computing firm that make the chips and boards for spaceships, or something like that. Johnny was only listening to every third word and only understood every sixth. She talks super fast and pretty much everything is a joke apart from when it’s not. The longer and better he knows her the more it is patently obvious where LaRusso gets it from. Her company gets picked up for a new contract and need someone to train a bunch of the staff. It seems honestly kind of rad for her - she’s bossing all these dudes around and shouting down the phone about <em>timelines</em> and <em>deliverables</em> like she’s Donald Trump.</p><p>For his part, the job involves helping her pack up all her stuff, sweet-talking the LaRusso apartment’s fax machine and driving back and forward to Fresno three times a week to drop off manilla folders. He gets paid $3.35 an hour.</p><p>The rest of time, since LaRusso is gone, he is free to hang out with the old Cobra gang. Not including Dutch, obviously, who in a move that surprised exactly no one got himself almost immediately arrested and tried as an adult. Right now he’s rocking bright orange somewhere upstate. Apparently he won’t return Bobby’s calls which - more fool him, honestly.</p><p>They spend summer evenings on the sweet, desperate edge of something like a funhouse mirror version of last year - fires on the beach, soccer games, radio playing loud - and it’s easy to pretend that nothing’s changed. Couple of things have, though. The weirdest one is what Tommy finally cops to, what they’re all thinking; when the sun goes down it does get sorta breezey, the air tinted dark and cool. He honestly never noticed that before, but the red leather jacket is balled up under his bed rather than on his back.</p><p>The less weird one is that by the time the fire burns out everyone else has picked a girl to go home with but he cries off, for reasons he kinda can’t explain to anyone else and definitely can’t explain to himself.</p><p>When Daniel gets back it’s still technically summer, but by that time the mood has shifted.</p><p>The beach is quiet, when they go.</p><p>There’s only a few weeks left of Lucille’s idiot wrangling so she lets Johnny head home early when he asks all polite, no questions whatsoever until she puts a sting in the tail.</p><p>“Where are you off to?” Then she floats, casual like she doesn’t know exactly what she’s doing, “Seeing anyone special?”</p><p>Later, Johnny explains all this. He high tails it down 99 in almost two hours when it should take the better part of three, douses himself in cologne and picks LaRusso up like where they’re headed is no big deal.</p><p>“What,” Johnny asks after, grinning as he presses him into the sand. “You never had a summer fling?”</p><p>LaRusso laughs. “I’m having one right now.”</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>With LaRusso back in town they kind of just gravitate together.</p><p>It’s about the only thing the kid seems to have sorted out. Apparently Miyagi has this idea but he needs some cash to make it happen. They talk about it one day, climbed up on top rusty old shipping containers by the tracks. It sounds dumb as hell. Then Daniel puffs out his chest and talks about blowing his whole college fund, at which point it sounds <em>dumber</em> than hell.</p><p>Rubbing the back of his head where Johnny just cuffed him, LaRusso pouts. “Not like I’m going.”</p><p>“Your mom probably worked mad hard putting that away, man.” Johnny remembers an empty <em>Skippy</em> jar that his mom used to feed a little bit of her tip money into at the end of every night. Remembers her apologising over and over whenever they had to open it because the boiler packed up again or the car wouldn’t start.</p><p>A thought occurs to him. “Hey,” he says, idea forming. “Wanna use the money of someone who didn’t?”</p><p>There’s no way that Sid <em>likes </em>the idea of giving Johnny money, but it’s not really any different to all the other ways he’s bought Johnny’s compliance over the past couple of years. They’ve got a system. Johnny cleans up nice for the fancy parties and looks just like the perfect son Sid never wanted, and in exchange he gets a car, or a motorcycle, or a couple of grand to give to the elderly karate instructor of the dude he got off with at senior prom. It’s a simple exchange.</p><p>Not to mention it’s just insanely fun to wring the asshole for as much as he’ll cough up.</p><p>When he cashes the check he tries to give it all to LaRusso, who instead makes him take it to the old man himself like some cat depositing a chewed-up dead bird. Johnny didn’t realize Miyagi actually lived in the junk yard. He thought LaRusso just chose to hang out there, like it reminded him of Jersey or something.</p><p>Inside the zen garden Miyagi makes him green tea in some fancy little pot, which would be a nice gesture if it didn’t taste like dishwater.</p><p>“You help me.”</p><p>“Uh, yeah. Sure did.”</p><p>“No,” the guy says, firm. “You help me.”</p><p>And that’s how Johnny gets his job.</p><p>It’s a learning curve. The tiny trees are badass and they get that way by training them, which he relates to, but with wire and clipping and cutting, which he does not. The sheers he gets given to use are tiny, and whenever he has to handle or re-pot something the small branches and delicate leaves make his hands feel huge and clumsy. He knocks something over every single time he turns around. Bull in a fucking china shop, that’s him. Miyagi keeps telling him to trust.</p><p><em>Trust</em> <em>the picture, </em>he says, like it’s just so easy to figure out what it is that you want.</p><p>Sid’s money doesn't buy much. Not to put too fine a point on it, but what it buys is six month’s rent of a total dump. The shop constitutes a shack in a neighborhood that could generously be called bohemian and more realistically be called gross. The walls are mostly made out of wood planks and windows like the world’s most flammable greenhouse. It’s got a whole hokey, down-to-earth thing going on. Makes him think of a <em>Cracker Barrel </em>closed for health-code violations<em>. </em></p><p>Weirdly - and he’s not saying this to be a dick - but it fits with the LaRusso atmosphere.</p><p>There’s the big room you enter when you step through the door. There’s also a back room, which is probably going to be useful for storing whatever the hell kinda stuff you need to run a goddamn tree shop.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>It is only after their fifth consecutive afternoon spent making out in the shop’s back room when they should be cleaning and decluttering it that Johnny questions it.</p><p>“Are we -,” he starts then flounders. He can’t come up with the right word. <em>Dating</em> feels way too official, <em>in a relationship</em> even more so, and <em>together</em> nebulous and huge in a way that doesn’t feel incorrect in so much as it does kind of like staring directly at the sun. “Going steady?”</p><p>In response LaRusso just snorts, loud and surprised.</p><p>Johnny turns away, stung. Daniel grabs his wrist and reels him back.</p><p>“No, no. I wasn’t laughing at you.” He releases his grip once Johnny is facing him square on, and runs both his hands down the front of Johnny’s chest. They settle, palms on his lower ribs. There’s something shit-eating in Daniel’s voice, but it is mostly covered by the sound of a smile. “Yes, Johnny. I’ll go steady with you."</p><p>“I didn’t actually <em>ask</em>,” he grumbles, but the complaint gets lost.</p><p>Every fibre of Johnny’s being rebels against thinking about this but increasingly he just can’t help it. The idea goes round and always comes back looking the same, time after time. He puts his walkman on and stares at the space between his bed and the ceiling and the only thing he can think is, crap. All the reasons they shouldn’t be together and yet it still somehow feels right that that they are. Easier. The best answer is often the simplest one, A squared plus B squared equals C squared and all that.</p><p>Like every great theory it feels a little hypothetical, until it gets put into practice. Miyagi sends LaRusso to source some pots and bowls from the conveniently located studio across the street, and he returns with the claim that the girl there will get to work on something lickety split and also apparently that they’re going to be taking her out that evening.</p><p>Later, Daniel goes to retrieve her while Johnny brings the Ford around.</p><p>When he’s parked by the curb, he leaves the engine running warm but gets out to lean up against the door. LaRusso still has trust issues letting other people drive. This position gives Johnny a great vantage point to watch the tail end of the poor guy getting thoroughly rejected.</p><p>“- might just change your mind,” she’s saying, looking glum.</p><p>“What do you have, poison oak?”</p><p>“A boyfriend.”</p><p>“Hey, me too!” says Daniel brightly. He points backwards over his shoulder at Johnny, as if to illustrate his existence. Johnny throws up one hand in a lazy salute.</p><p>That seems to give her pause. “Oh.” Jessica blinks. “I was lying. I just thought you were interested in me.”</p><p>“No way.” Then he seems to realize exactly that how that sounds, and attempts to reassure. God, how did this guy get Ali. More to the point, how did this guy get <em>Johnny</em>. “Not that you aren’t cool, though!”</p><p>She smiles, a big happy grin, and brightens considerably. It’s like her ponytail gets higher on her head. “You bet I am.” Jessica flicks the light off inside and pulls the side door so it slams shut, pushes past LaRusso so that their shoulders knock, and bounces over to the car. “Hi, boyfriend.”</p><p>He opens the passenger door, lets her swing herself in. “Hey, yourself.”</p><p>“Where are we going?”</p><p>Johnny considers their options. “You ever been to the <em>Golf N’ Stuff</em>?”</p><p>Jessica shakes her head. Daniel makes eye contact with Johnny in the rearview as if searching for confirmation that this is an unthinkable concept.</p><p>“Alright,” says LaRusso decisively, putting the car in gear. “Decision made I guess.”</p><p>Accordingly to Jessica, who has been in town for a grand total of two months, there is nothing to do. As someone who has spent nineteen mostly-happy years here even before he started using all his free time to play tonsil hockey, Johnny gets kind of defensive about LA. He begins a grand and passionate testimony for beach parties, long walks at night, motorbike races with your friends. Even Daniel joins in after a bit, acknowledging the joy of fighting and summers so hot you can go shirtless all day.</p><p>Jessica twists in her seat, to take in the sight of the both of them at once. “You don’t have many friends that are girls, do you.” It’s not phrased like a question.</p><p>“Ali said we were jerks.”</p><p>“Are you?”</p><p>Johnny pauses and considers this.</p><p>In the interim, LaRusso doesn’t hesitate. “Oh yeah,” he asserts. “Definitely.”</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>Turns out bonsai trees are normal trees. They’re not special stumpy dwarf trees, they’re just regular old could-support-the-Swiss-Family-Robison trees. Who knew. Unsurprising is the fact that trees grow super slowly, so they gotta order some stock that’s already getting on in years. Still, it helps to be prepared for the future, so Miyagi has got him prepping these black plastic trays of baby trees.</p><p>He’s also lecturing him. It is possibly actually meant to be a pep talk, but if so it’s even worse at being a pep talk than it would be at being a lecture.</p><p>“Most important thing - fight with honor.”</p><p>“Yeah.” After half a bottle of Jack between them, Bobby once described to him how it feels when the cartilage crushes inside a joint, how it snaps then squishes under your weight. “Yeah,” he repeats lamely.</p><p>“Miyagi home think honor like black and white. Here, I realize,” his voices goes funny, and it makes Johnny look up. “Other colors.”</p><p>“Can you teach me?”</p><p>“Honor not something you teach.” Feeling dumb, Johnny turns away. Miyagi makes a little <em>tut </em>noise in his throat to get his attention back. “Something get taught out of you<em>.”</em></p><p>Yeah. <em>No bad students</em>. Right. “Then how can I learn?”</p><p>Miyagi shakes his head. “Not learn. Find again.” Then he points, hands covered in soil, to where Johnny’s own are trying to coax seedlings out of their cases. “Grow.”</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>Johnny didn’t think he was on opening today, but when he reaches <em>Little Trees </em>the door is still locked-up shut. It’s not until a good hour and a half later that Miyagi and Daniel finally stumble in through the door. He’s already sold this rad little sago palm<em>. </em>He even talked the guy into buying a bunch of books and tools to go with it, and he’s about to launch into bragging about this whole exchange when he notices that they both look kind of dazed.</p><p>LaRusso drops his bag to the ground. “The weirdest thing just happened. Some dude showed up at Mr. Miyagi’s house to tell us Kreese died.”</p><p>“Shit.” This, bizarrely, doesn’t really make Johnny feel anything. Probably means he’s handling this mad well. Score. “Why?”</p><p>“Want Daniel-san fight in tournament.”</p><p>Johnny looks between them, ping-pong match style. “Are you gonna? What did you say?”</p><p>“Uh, no?” LaRusso just kind of boggles at him. “And I said sorry for your loss and all, but last year the guy tried to choke my boyfriend to death in the parking lot? So I’m not super torn up about it.”</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>It’s dark out but he wants to get this right. He’s winding thin copper wire round and round branches but can’t settle on a position that looks good. He’s gotta; this is the first one that Miyagi has entrusted just to him, for him to shape. This thing is five years old and might live another fifty on some person’s windowsill if he can manage to make it not suck enough that they might <em>want </em>it to. In between his efforts he’ll look to the text book open on the bench top.</p><p>“What is, uh,” Johnny has to double check the order of the letters, but still feels like he’s guessing at the pronunciation. There’s way too many vowels in this one. “A… asabiyya<em>?</em>”</p><p>Bobby, who is home for Thanksgiving break and definitely not exuding enough gratitude for someone who decided Johnny’s plans for the evening were to play Alex Trebek for sociology vocab words, answers chipper. “Asabiyya is the cohesive, social bond that forms as civilisations develop.”</p><p>“Nice.” Oh, so that’s how you say it. “Sounds like you know this stuff. Why’re you so worried?”</p><p>“Because if I want to have even a <em>hope</em> of transferring to Berkeley next year, I need a 3.0 minimum in everything.” He catches the baseball he’s been tossing up and down but doesn’t throw it again, waiting until Johnny looks over to where the noise has stopped. “<em>Everything</em>.”</p><p>“Wow.”</p><p>He shrugs. “You said it.” Then Bobby tenses up, staring past Johnny. His eyebrows are all fuzzy in concentration.</p><p>“What?”</p><p>Bobby keeps looking behind him for another moment, then blinks. “Nothing, just thought I saw someone at the window.” He shrugs. “They ran off though.”</p><p>“Weird. Hey, pass me that trowel, then tell me everything that you know about Harriet Martineau.”</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>Daniel buys Johnny a<em> New Kids On The Block</em> tape to wind him up, which backfires when Johnny decides to play it without fail at every opportunity whenever they’re in the car together. This is probably why Daniel offers to be the one to drive them the night they have to deliver this stupid huge but gratifyingly expensive order of thirty bonsai to some country club’s drinks reception thing.</p><p>It’s over in Alhambra and neither of them really knows where they’re going but they find it eventually, handing off the tray of trees to a waiter outside. The tinkling of glassware and the soft sounds of music filter through the open door when the guy carries them in. Johnny’s been to enough of these things that he’s not envious. Turns out its infinitely more fun to make LaRusso circle block after block in search of an <em>In-N-Out </em>and then reach across to stick fries into his open mouth whenever he’s using the turn signal. Who knew.</p><p>They’re on the 10, balled up napkins and waxed paper bags in the footwell, when the sky opens like an overturned bucket.</p><p>It’s the freeway so they can’t exactly <em>stop</em>, but at the top of the next exit ramp there’s a red and without conferring they each throw their doors open and jump out, hands scrambling against clips on the slippery leather. The roof latches into place with a firm push and LaRusso is blinking his bangs out of his eyes where they’re plastered to his forehead, and he’s laughing, and the traffic that’s backed behind them are all laying on their horns, and the street lights are shining off the wet asphalt, and Johnny thinks for the first time, shit.</p><p>Johnny loves loud. He knows he does. Loud and obnoxious like a jumbotron, like the cigarette paper bang-snaps he and his mom used to set off in the parking lot.</p><p>What’s weird is that for once wants to keep this thing quiet. Wants to keep it selfishly, cradled like a small sprout in oversized hands, just for him. Just for a moment. Just for now. It’ll probably make it out on its own soon anyway. This thing between them doesn’t need shouting - from day one it’s been loud enough all on its own.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>There’s a bit of a problem, and that problem is that a small shop which sells smaller trees doesn’t really need three full-time employees.</p><p>“And I was here first,” Johnny shrugs, “so.”</p><p>LaRusso just looks confused, is the best part. “Are you… <em>firing</em> me?”</p><p>“He not firing you, Daniel-san. I am.” Miyagi pipes up from where he’s sat behind the register. He tips his head towards Johnny. “He just do dirty work.”</p><p>Johnny grins like a shark.</p><p>Daniel isn’t actually fired, obviously. They just can’t really afford the expense. Miyagi and Johnny sat on the floor last week after close and harnessed distant math classes and math classes that just felt distant, respectively, to try and figure out where the shop could save some money. Miyagi plies a shellshocked Daniel with a cup of the good dishwater and explains that there is always a place for him if he needs it, and there will still be part-time hours for deliveries or when Johnny is out, but that his talents may be better suited elsewhere. The insinuation that Johnny has no other such talents would sting if it weren’t kinda true.</p><p>So LaRusso ends up getting a new job. He asks around a few place and settles on the offer from a car dealership nearby. He likes cars, likes the idea of finding things that suit folks and making them happy. Plays to his strengths he’s a smooth talker who sure can run his mouth. To top it off it’s ritzy as hell, which probably makes him feel good.</p><p>Shit can’t last, though. It only takes a couple of months for things to start going south. The other guys there have been shilling cars to assholes like his step-dad since Johnny was in middle school and they spend every moment in the break room ragging on LaRusso for his accent and his shoes, which as someone who used to do basically the same thing offends Johnny on a personal level. What low-hanging fruit. So the place was full of douchebags from the off - who the fuck expects a twenty year-old to buy two suits and a dozen shirts without an advance? - but it’s only when they eventually piece together that the blonde Daniel alludes to dating and the blonde who drops off leftovers of Laura’s lasagna in a paper lunchbag are the same person that they get real unpleasant.</p><p>The day that Daniel comes into the shop with a fat lip and busted knuckles is the day that Miyagi has to channel every ounce of his zen non-violence bull to stop Johnny marching down there and rearranging some faces. The fact that LaRusso gave twice as good as he got - hell <em>yeah</em> he did, that’s his boy - means they never even dare think about starting shit again. Even so, after that, it starts wearing him down pretty quick. Thing about LaRusso is that he ain’t no quitter so he won’t ever actually give it up, just complains about the whole thing loudly and constantly until Johnny sucks on his tongue for the sake of getting some goddamn peace and quiet.</p><p>Things change eventually, though. There’s an order from the shop that needs delivered - Johnny’s busy with the world’s slowest customer so Daniel takes an afternoon and goes instead. Turns out that while Johnny was painstakingly explaining bonsai care to a lady older than the dirt, LaRusso was getting headhunted. He’d parked up, headed in to drop the tree off and come back outside to seven guys in khaki gawking at the Ford. Apparently there was a garage on the other side of the street. When the doll in charge learns that he did the restoration on the fender all by himself in his sensei’s yard they try to hire him on the fucking spot.</p><p>All the tinkering he’s done on Lucille’s jalopy paid off. He’s <em>good </em>at it, good at it in this artless hard-won way that he claims feels like learning karate for the first time. Soon he’s strutting around like a little Italian sun with oil under his nails that in certain kinds of light looks like blood. He trades in the suits for overalls and old denim, including most notably this one particular pair of ratty low-slung Levis that give Johnny an uncomfortably vivid fantasy he projects back onto LaRusso by singing ‘I’m On Fire’ at him off-key whenever they make an appearance.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>To put it simply, Johnny just truly cannot wait to not live with Sid anymore. Objectively he has been - fine, since Johnny started being some kinda queer under his roof. Sid is the kind of man who prides himself on not being racist because he treats everyone like shit equally. If anything he seems to treat Johnny <em>better</em>, maybe because he is finally living up to expectations. He’s grown up into the disappointing degenerate he was always told he could be if he only just applied himself.</p><p>Fighting his own battle, Daniel is beginning to tear his hair out.</p><p>“I love my mom,” he always starts, sounding like he’s trying to reassure himself more than anyone else, “but I can’t go on like this forever, you know?”</p><p>Johnny, who has previously heard this hidden under Daniel’s bed stark naked because Lucille decided to finish work a little bit early, does in fact know.</p><p>He is already spending as little time at home as is humanly possible - bouncing between hours at Miyagi’s shop, dinner at the new LaRusso place, takeout and drinks with whoever from school is still around, crawling back late at night and sticking his head in long enough to see his mom before going directly to bed, do not pass Go, do not collect $200 - that moving out seems like the path of least resistance at this point.</p><p>Only bump in the road is that they’ve been searching for places for weeks and still can’t find anywhere. Johnny didn’t think he was being picky. He’s slummed it before and at the approaching end of Sid’s generosity he surely will again. So he just put a blanket request in for something close enough to the shop that he won’t have to drive on bad traffic days but otherwise he’s mainly left LaRusso to do the looking, because he can extract the classifieds from the copies of the <em>Daily News </em>that his mom picks up, whereas the only newspapers that enter the Weinberg house are four foot wide and full of share prices.</p><p>Right now, Lucille is supposedly out at her bridge class. They’re meant to have a couple of hours alone. Johnny doesn’t trust it. This is why his pants are still on, and why he’s occupying himself sprinkling way too much fish food into the bowl on the counter while Daniel is sat on the couch on the far side of the room. He’s got his legs up and is using his thighs as a desk to draw lines through what seems to be every offering in today’s paper.</p><p>“Hey, uh, I know it’s not ideal,” Daniel ventures, careful, “but what if we considered one bed places?” His face is weird, the kind of scrunched up wince you do before you pull off a bandaid. “There’s really nothing else in our budget.”</p><p>Johnny just stares at him.</p><p>He throws up his hands in a little defensive motion, mouth still running. “Or not! Not is also fine! I don’t wanna pressure you. I'm easy.”</p><p>“LaRusso,” Johnny eventually says, his voice slow and dangerous. He walks in measured, careful steps across the room. Daniel blinks, like a prey animal. “Are you telling me that you have spent the last month looking at two bedroom apartments.”</p><p>“I knew you were freaking out!” This is a fair observation. The longer that this search has gone on and by extension the longer that Daniel has continued quoting prices far beyond what either of them could reasonably expect to be taking home at the end of the month, the tenser that Johnny has gotten. He’s been snappy about it, frustrated because he’s actually summed up enough balls to make a what feels like a big commitment but the universe won’t seem to let him.</p><p>Johnny tries to express this succinctly.</p><p>“I was freaking out because I thought our rent was gonna be insane!”</p><p>A beat of silence. “Oh.” Like his strings have been chopped, Daniel falls back against the arm of the couch.</p><p>“Yes, <em>oh</em>!” Johnny grabs the newspaper out of his hands and thwacks him in the side with it ’til he makes room, then mirrors his position. “I’m not freaked out about living with you, dipshit. I thought we were,” he gestures between them in vague way. Daniel continues looking blank, so he elaborates. “Doing this.”</p><p>“We are!” Daniel reassures, urgent then softer. His face folds. “I want to.”</p><p>There’s no way this is going to be the easiest version of his life. There’s going to be times when they run out of hot water. There’s going to be times they don’t take the trash out for weeks or block the drain or have to defend their own existence. There’s going to be times they argue. Realistically, there’s probably going to be so very, very many times they argue. But for every one of those there’s going to be a time that Johnny gets to roll over in the morning and plant some stupid wet kiss on that face.</p><p>So that’s probably a fair trade.</p><p>“Where’s all the old papers? Now we know there’s a thousand listings we can <em>actually afford</em>.”</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>Johnny tries to pick Daniel up to carry him across the threshold. The little fucker wriggles and goes for <em>his </em>legs, which is how they end up brawling outside their new front door, which is how they end up meeting their next-door neighbor and also building security.</p><p>Their first apartment is a beige shoebox with textured wallpaper and a blue-green laminate worktop that Johnny legitimately though was covered in bread mold the first time he saw it. It is - in a word - uninspiring. Then again, so are their collective worldly possessions; an old futon graciously donated by Lucille, two boxes of clothes, and one box labelled ‘miskellaneous’ that contains mostly karate trophies and cassette tapes. After they carry in the last of the boxes Daniel pushes him up against the door, reaches past his right ear to pull the chain across, and then drops to his knees.</p><p>Johnny claps a hand over his mouth until he realizes he doesn’t have to do that any more, at which point he instead threads his fingers through Daniel’s hair and pulls. Daniel makes this high, urgent moan that vibrates around Johnny’s dick and he comes like its being punched out of him and oh fuck, he loves this apartment, he loves this awful little apartment so goddamn much.</p><p>They fuck on every horizontal surface and most of the vertical ones within a week.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>He gets in from work covered in sweat and mud and finds LaRusso at the counter, mail collected from the doormat and all spread out. He’s in his grease monkey getup with the filth to match so Johnny puts them both in the shower. When he emerges later LaRusso is back in exactly the same position, worrying his lower lip between his teeth.</p><p>“You’re making a face.”</p><p>Daniel doesn’t look up. “An unattractive one?”</p><p><em>Eh. </em>He considers. “Not entirely.”</p><p>“I’m just concerned.”</p><p>Johnny prods the pad of his thumb into the space between LaRusso’s eyebrows. “Stop. You worry too much and then you don’t sleep right and then you always have weird dreams.”</p><p>“We were in <em>The Music Man</em> and it was one time,” Daniel replies, in the tone of voice that makes it clear how tired he is of having to defend himself on this. He stabs a finger at a piece of paper. “My checking account is an asshole.”</p><p>Shit. “Are we good?”</p><p>“We’ll be fine. Gas is an issue, though. Might need to walk to the garage a bit more.”</p><p>Johnny has a thought, and then another one immediately swallows it, like Pac-Man. “Let’s sell my bike.”</p><p>Daniel’s jaw drops. “But you love your bike. You’ve got fond memories of harassing teenage girls on it.”</p><p>It’s a couple years old but all credit to Sid, he never bought crap. They should get a couple of hundred bucks. “Ugh, love the idea of you not walking four miles each way more.”</p><p>Somehow, this deeply underwhelming statement makes Daniel stare at him like he’s just made the world’s grandest and most passionate declaration.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>In December 1988, they spend the holidays in Parsippany. The invite comes the weekend after Thanksgiving and Daniel declines; Lou was gonna give him first choice of all the time-and-a-half shifts. Like a bad penny it keeps coming back, though. Daniel stops answering the phone but eventually Johnny picks it up one too many times and then he gets invited to come along, too. After that point Lucille turns on them and eventually the lure of enough money to buy the good brand of laundry detergent isn’t enough to withstand the combined force of all that guilt-tripping.</p><p>The shop is actually pretty busy in the run up to Christmas - last year Johnny had the idea for mini holly bushes, and fir trees that come bundled with tiny decorations, and they’re selling crazy good - but on the 19th he hands his set of keys back over to Miyagi and throws their bags into the trunk of the car.</p><p>They rotate driving duty. Lucille favours the highways where the weather is good and the interstate for everything north-east of Kansas. Johnny is unprepared for the cold. He’s never been past the Rockies. In Michigan he gets out to piss behind a closed down truck-stop and is convinced his dick is either gonna fall off or retract so far within his body that regardless he’s never gonna see it again.</p><p>With tree lined streets that end in a lake, Parsippany is pretty to look at but has some jumped-up ideas about its own grandeur that honestly just explain so much about LaRusso.</p><p>Uncle Louie is stuck in his chair the whole time apart from when he’s stuck in bed. Tessie seems frazzled, like she’s one bad thing away from a nervous breakdown at any given moment, but she’s nice enough. No one mentions what they are to each other but no one doesn’t <em>not </em>mention it, and on Christmas morning there’s a wrapped gift for him under the tree. It’s a knit scarf kind of like the one LaRusso got in the mail last year. Johnny feels bad about how impersonal the set of <em>Bed, Bath &amp; Beyond </em>hand-soaps he and Daniel picked out are by comparison.</p><p>The days between Christmas and New Years are spent earning his keep; that is to say, doing all the jobs for (in Tessie’s words) ‘strapping young men’ such as flipping the mattresses, clearing out the loft and shoveling the driveway what feels like every twenty-five minutes.</p><p>The house is a weird shade of pink on the outside and a weirder shade of pink on the inside. Every room seems to have this vague musky smell like <em>Giorgio Beverly Hills</em> and a turntable that apparently plays nothing but Bruce Springsteen. Lucille sleeps in Louis Jr.’s room - a navy-blue single with a ceiling adorned by glow in the dark stars - while the kid himself takes the floor. Johnny sympathizes; his sleeping situation for the duration is two cushions off of a sun lounger while Daniel gets the floral-printed three-seater because he went for rock when Johnny went for scissors.</p><p>Regardless, Johnny climbs onto the couch every night and sleeps with his face in Daniel’s hair and knees tucked in behind knees. Each morning Daniel rolls him out onto the floor again to reclaim a sense of propriety plus the five inches of valuable cushion space Johnny dared to steal, but on New Year’s they just forget. Everyone is exhausted. They all stayed up ’til late; watching the ball drop on the little square TV, toasting with leftover eggnog and letting off Roman candles in the backyard.</p><p>Lucille creeps through to the bathroom at about 4am. Johnny knows this, because when she flushes the toilet she wakes him up, and in the triangle of yellow light that glows out into the hallway they make eye contact.</p><p>“Did you sleep well, Johnny?” she asks in an airy voice, when they assemble later that morning by the coffee maker. God, she’s still such a shit. It’s the best. Daniel has got a lot to learn from his mom, she’s got a real subtle touch to it that the protege just has not mastered yet.</p><p>Johnny was taught to be polite, not to mention he’s well familiar with how to response to LaRusso shitheadery by this point. He smiles, all teeth and gums. “Wonderful, Mrs. L. And yourself?”</p><p>“Oh yes, not very often I get to share a room with such a handsome man.”</p><p>Louie Jr. visibly perks up in his chair. He kicks his legs. Cute kid.</p><p>All in all it’s kinda nice. The next year, Lucille goes back, but they stay home. For Christmas they exchange presents that they both already know about - turns out there’s absolutely nowhere to hide things given that they both tried to use the space above the refrigerator- and do as much overtime as is humanly possible. New Year’s similarly has less fanfare, but at least it is a proper celebration. Not every day you start a new decade. Five minutes to midnight and they walk down to the parking lot since they want to steal the sight of someone else’s fireworks and all the windows in their apartment face the grey outside wall of the next building twenty foot away. They’re not the only ones with that idea, and soon there’s a little crowd of people in sweaters and bathrobes all shuffling about and staring at their watches. Johnny’s got his scarf on.</p><p>No one actually needs to be watching the clock; you can tell it turns midnight from the way the entire city’s horizon explodes suddenly into color.</p><p>There’s cheering, neighbors shaking hands or hugging. Some of these people are almost complete and total strangers but that doesn’t stop them. In high spirits, Ms. Currie from across the hall passes around a bottle of malt whiskey to the assembled. It burns on the way down and leaves Daniel’s lips shiny, letting them catch the reflections out of the sky.</p><p>Johnny leans down and covers that mouth with his. When he pulls back he finds Daniel’s eyes straight away. He looks kinda shocked, honestly. It’s the same expression he made that first time in the Cobra Kai dojo, that time Johnny looked right at him and thought what he’s thinking now.</p><p><em>Oh, </em>and then the realisation, <em>this is going to be good.</em></p><p> </p><p> </p><p>-</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Johnny drops his keys into the stupid little bowl by the door (it is one of those dishes made out of a melted bottle and Johnny got it from the market because it's badass and because Daniel kept saying that they needed something or the new console table would get scratched, only Daniel hated it on sight, but he’s realising that relationships are all about compromise) and is immediately hit by a wave of garlic so pungent it makes his eyes sting.</p><p>Daniel has started getting into cooking, is the thing.</p><p>Day-to-day the two of them subsist on a diet of takeout pizza, toaster pastries, and fried eggs on white bread. It's a pretty sweet setup but even Johnny is loathe to admit it can’t go on forever. Probably. Sometimes he gets a weird craving for unseasoned lettuce, or feels the sudden urge to jog around the parking lot a couple of times just so that his arteries de-clog. Not to mention how no one warned him that, when you reach your mid-twenties, your metabolism makes a head-on collision with a brick wall.</p><p>LaRusso has always been single minded about three things: the correct way to fold a fitted sheet, fucking with Johnny, and macaroni and cheese. Consequently there has been box after box of <em>Kraft</em> in the rotation of cholesterol-laden carbohydrates they take turn heating up. Now though, he keeps pulling Johnny aside as he walks past the kitchen and asking shit like whether the butter <em>looks browned yet</em>, and putting stuff like ‘pancetta’ on the grocery list so that Johnny is forced to ask the lady at the store what in the hell that is.</p><p>“Jesus,” he asks, once he’s recovered his senses. “What the fuck are you doing?”</p><p>Daniel doesn’t even both to turn around, just gestures at the spread on the counter in front of him; the chopping board, their one good knife, the recipe book propped open with a can of beer. “I’m trying to do this cacciatore thing my mom used to make but the amount of stuff it needs is insane man, I’m telling you.”</p><p>Johnny gets up close behind his back and leans over his shoulder. He squints at the page in the book.</p><p>“Cloves, LaRusso. Five cloves.”</p><p>Daniel follows his line of sight. Couple of seconds later his head twitches to the side, at the painstakingly peeled five whole heads of garlic waiting to be chopped.</p><p>“Shit.”</p><p>Johnny slaps him on the ass.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>One morning, Daniel announces he’s changing his job. Or that he’s doing less of his current job? It’s unclear. Johnny is only half listening, busy trying to tune the antenna on their new TV. It’s got the VCR player <em>built in</em>.</p><p>“I think I want to specialize in interiors. Trim.” He isn’t phased by whatever look he’s reading off of Johnny’s face, just keeps loading on more nouns until he judges the point to have been absorbed. “Upholstery, handles, finishing. Stuff like that, only for the vintage cars.”</p><p>Johnny finally looks up. “That’s - niche.”</p><p>“Says the man who sells bonsai trees for a living.”</p><p>It’s not technically a promotion but it does come with a pay rise. So they move again, because what could you possibly want to do with your disposable income other than make it easier for your in-laws to stop over.</p><p>All that can be said in favour of the new place is that it’s more colorful than the last. They’ve got avocado bathroom suites. Plural. There are two; a family bath off the hallway and, joyously, an en-suite for the master bedroom. This morning he was running late to work and in a piss-poor mood yet Daniel still crowded him up against the ugly pink tile that was all cold against his ass and it sucked because Johnny has been conditioning himself since he was a teenager to love exclusively this.</p><p>At least Daniel, whenever he gets the chance to offer someone the tour, always highlights the positives.</p><p>“It has a balcony!”</p><p>“It has a fire escape,” Johnny corrects. It’s three foot by three foot wide and made out of trip hazards.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>In the middle of ringing up some broad - she came in thinking they were a flower shop, but Johnny got her hooked onto the apple blossom trees before she made it back out to the sidewalk - she comments, “Oh! How cute!”</p><p>He follows her line of sight to the <em>Beanie Baby</em> crane sat on top of the new computer. The legs dangle down.</p><p>She reaches over and gives it a poke. It wobbles but doesn’t fall. The little thing has, appropriately, got pretty good balance.</p><p>“Careful,” he warns, tearing off her receipt. “He kicks.”</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>Suddenly, Daniel starts smelling nice. Well - he suddenly starts smelling <em>different</em>. He kind of always smelled nice to Johnny, even when he smelled of gross teenage boy stink, because Johnny has always processed things with his dick, his heart, and his brain, exclusively in that order.</p><p>The new smell is apparently a kind-to-scalp tea tree shampoo, but the wellness kick doesn’t stop there. Daniel’s been reading, which never ends well. Against his will he gets a cocktail of multivitamins poured down his throat each morning like a jailed suffragette. When she stops by for a coffee, Laura mentions feeling a bit under the weather and out of nowhere he produces ten pamphlets on female health, the world’s most unsettling close-up magician. Lastly he gifts Johnny a selection of tubes and pots supposedly curated for his ‘skin type’, which is something that he apparently has now.</p><p>Generally Johnny doesn’t care what people think of him unless they’re thinking he’s hot, which is basically how he got through the latter years of the Reagan administration with his sanity intact. This is helped by the fact that he seems to be aging at a rate somewhere in the middle of Bobby ‘Luke Skywalker on <em>Rogaine</em>’ Brown and Daniel ‘still getting carded at age thirty two’ LaRusso. When Daniel found his first grey hair a couple of years ago he wouldn’t shut up about it, moaning like he was going to transform into Peter Falk overnight. He’s not found another since.</p><p>“This is all girly shit,” Johnny declares.</p><p>Daniel gives him an unimpressed look which suggests that, especially under their circumstances, he try harder.</p><p>“John, we live in California. If you don’t start applying moisturiser and sun screen now you’re gonna look like Leatherface by the time we’re fifty.”</p><p>“My face is fine.”</p><p>Daniel nods, serious. “Great face. Love the face. Will still kiss it even when it ends up looking like it’s stitched together out of murder victim bits, but I wish you’d save me the trouble.”</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>Johnny’s got his head in his hands. Nothing’s wrong, he’s just bored as fuck.</p><p>The bell above the door goes, and he flicks his eyes up.</p><p>“Didn’t we fire you already?” Johnny asks, scooting his stool in. He tilts up his face.</p><p>Daniel pecks him on the cheek as he brushes past. Johnny puts his head back down. “Come to clean out my cubicle,” Daniel states, sounding absentminded. To be fair to him, Johnny has made this joke at least once a month for the last decade. After digging around under the desk Daniel comes up with Johnny’s backpack. He extracts the keys to the apartment and dangles them illustratively, before pocketing them.</p><p>“Taking the tow out to the Hills and I’ve left my set in the office.”</p><p>“Can’t someone else do it?”</p><p>Daniel looks deeply insulted that he would even ask. “Are you kidding? Breaking bad news to rich people is my passion.”</p><p>“Oh, gotcha. Anything good?”</p><p>“Some oil baron’s kid drove their Ferrari into a pool.” Inside of Johnny, the firsthand knowledge that he absolutely would have done this, and the secondhand knowledge of how much the chlorine would affect the leather interior, float around on top of each other like water and oil. “Get to tell them we need enough cash to start an international conflict to fix it, or get to see ‘em weep. Either way my day is made.”</p><p>“What if they don’t cry?”</p><p>Astonishing how much judgement he can fit into his voice. Somehow it still always manages to sound disbelieving yet also deeply unsurprised. “I can’t handle that kind of disappointment again, John.” They had gone to see the new <em>Star Wars </em>prequel last week and the wound was still fresh.</p><p>“Daniel-san!” The interruption comes from the back-room; more often than not, on the days that he comes in, Johnny is just about able to convince Miyagi to hang out back there. There’s a chair with lumbar support. That said he really does lend some showmanship to the whole bonsai ownership process. Johnny breaks him out when they need the big guns to close a sale. “Mother still need look at computer!”</p><p>“Yeah, Mr. Miyagi, I know.” Good luck. It’s six months until the new millennium and kind of like a seashell with the ocean, if you call Lucille at work you can hear the sound of software engineers losing their minds in real time.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>The very worst part of this whole situation is that Johnny can’t even remember how the argument started, which means he doesn’t even know if he fucked his whole life up but at least got to be <em>right </em>about it.</p><p>At some point earlier he probably did know, but that knowledge got cleared off the table with the last round of empties. Speaking of - he pulls out a ten and waves it vaguely in the air.</p><p>The same shitty bartender who has put pitcher after pitcher of lukewarm <em>Coors</em> in front of him for the last two nights with a consistency that you really do gotta look at as its own fucked-up sort of perfection appears. He places down next to Johnny a pint of some craft beer decidedly better than what he was planning on ordering. There’s enough of that crap in the fridge back at the apartment though; that’s why Johnny came <em>here</em>, to drink beer bad enough to make him feel the piece of shit he’s turned into.</p><p>The bartender, whose name Johnny has still not bothered to learn, nods over to the right. “From the lady.”</p><p>Up the bar there’s a woman - sliding off her seat, now, stepping over in pointy little high heels.</p><p>Smiling, she offers a hand. “You looked blue.”</p><p>She’s smoking hot, in an obvious sort of way. Tight dress that pushes up and pulls in just right, long blonde hair and eyes that aren’t entirely blue so much as they just <em>aren’t brown</em>, thank Christ.</p><p>“Not anymore.”</p><p>By the time Johnny gets back home the sun has gone down. The parking lot is illuminated by orange streetlight. Daniel’s car is in its spot. This makes him happy, and then very cold all over very quickly. He empties his stomach into the half-dead azalea bush by the turn-off from the road, and then the evening really only devolves from there.</p><p>“You walked away! You walked away like what we have is nothing!”</p><p>“I was pissed off so I went to my mom’s for two days! God, want to talk about throwing our life away, look at you. So fucking ready to pack up and move on to the next thing that you didn’t even wait out the weekend.”</p><p>“I thought you’d left, what was I meant to do?”</p><p>A kind of bewildered <em>uuuh </em>noise builds then dies in LaRusso’s throat. “Not fucking a stranger the second you think I’m gone would be a start.”</p><p>“How was I meant to know, huh?! How was I meant -“ <em>to know you’d come back, </em>is how Johnny means to continue, but he’s cut off.</p><p>Daniel shouts, somewhat predictably. But there’s definitely something starting to shatter in his voice now. “Stop waiting for it to happen, Johnny! Stop waiting for whatever stupid thing you think’s gonna make me go for good because it doesn’t exist!”</p><p>At that the fight leaves him; he almost looks like he deflates, shoulders slumping defeated after one final bout. It’s not a look he’s particularly good at wearing.</p><p>“You can’t promise that. You can’t.”</p><p>Daniel looks up the ceiling for a long second, then back down. “I already know all your stupid shit. I’ve done most of it with you.”</p><p>Being with LaRusso, loving him wholly and utterly in a way he still feels unequipped for all these years later exposes Johnny like a stripped wire. “Jesus, man. I freaked out, alright?” He tries to gloss over the fact that him going to the bar and then grabbing the first woman who was willing was basically the equivalent of a golden retriever destroying the couch cushions because he thought his owners were never coming home. “You’re it for me. I chose us at seventeen and I’ve got nothing else and I am straight up <em>terrified</em> of it.”</p><p>Daniel just looks at him, all dark eyes. It feels like he’s being seen down to his fucking spine, to the meat and viscera at the very core of him. “Johnny, you’re the love of my life. You gotta start acting like you believe that.”</p><p>He does. He does, is the fucked up thing. He’s still not dumb but even then you can’t miss every time Daniel responds to one of his shitty jokes or tucks the covers in when he gets out of bed first. Johnny is just so used to living in the world that Daniel LaRusso inexplicably invited him in to share that paying attention to that fact would be like suddenly deciding to notice all the oxygen in the room.</p><p>“So we’re… okay?” Johnny’s reasonably sure he’s still tracking this conversation, but it’s not until Daniel nods wearily and verbally confirms it that Johnny finally lets himself unclench. “And you’re not mad? Or upset?”</p><p>Daniel flaps a hand, blasé. “Oh, no, I am both incandescently angry and incredibly sad. Shake me like a <em>Magic 8 Ball</em> later and see which one floats. But you’re hungover after the bender you went on because you thought our fifteen year relationship broke down, and I’ve not slept in three days because turns out I can’t if you’re not there kicking me in the kidney. So I think for now we just say that’s that.”</p><p>“That’s that?” Johnny tries to fold his face into a beat-up smile. Daniel looks at him, bruised and lovely.</p><p>“That’s that.”</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>That, as it transpires, is very much not that. It is, arguably, perhaps the most that something can not be that.</p><p>“Do you remember,” Shannon calls to ask one afternoon about a month later, “if we used a condom?”</p><p>Johnny clips clean through a branch. He puts the sheers down. “Please tell me there’s a super normal reason you’re asking that.”</p><p>“My period is late.”</p><p>So no, then.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>Shannon loves Daniel. Thinks he’s hilarious. Regularly states that she wishes he was the one who got her pregnant. It is along that same vein that she is honest, brutally so, in the sort of cruel-to-be-kind way that makes his teeth hurt.</p><p>The first time they all met up, cold and sober in the light of day, she couldn’t have been clearer.</p><p>“I’ll have this baby, and I’ll send the best damn birthday presents. But I don’t want to be a mom.”</p><p>Johnny isn’t convinced. Like, the concept? Sure. Great. Stellar. Only - last week Daniel refused to admit he got confused between chilli <em>flakes</em> and chilli <em>powder</em> and the casserole that was meant to last four days was completely inedible. The week before that, Johnny forgot the word for feathers and had to ask where the ‘bird leaf’ pillows where. So forgive him if he’s not initially a little sceptical of their ability to look after a whole human being.</p><p>As one of those color-change chemistry paper test things, they babysit Bobby’s kid for a night. She’s not even that young; he went to her fourth birthday back in June, gave her a big box of markers. Johnny watches her try to use them to color in their throw cushions, watches Daniel ease them ever so gently out of her pudgy hands and smooth back her hair when she whimpers and rock her side-to-side and, shit, yeah.</p><p>Alright.</p><p>There’s other adjustments to be made, though. Johnny is trying to wrestle what is not Walmart’s finest but rather its eighty dollarest crib out of his passenger seat when something occurs to him.</p><p>“One of us is gonna have to change our car.”</p><p>Daniel looks at him in puzzlement. Johnny just shakes his cardboard box and kind of gestures, and LaRusso’s face immediately clears. “Oh, huh.” He remarks. “The Ford has a backseat?”</p><p>“It’s a convertible. You wanna drive into a lamppost and trebuchet our kid into the La Breas, that’s on your conscience.” Daniel frowns. “Plus have you seen the amount of scaffolding baby carriers need? You’d have to weld it to the goddamn chassis.”</p><p>They start looking at new cars.</p><p>It doesn’t go super smooth to start. In this as in most everything, he and Daniel have what one might call the same taste in opposite directions. There’s a brief shouting match defending the honor of the Corvette that Daniel drags kicking and screaming to a resolution by literally calling up his cousin and having them reel off dry automotive statistics until Johnny cries uncle out of sheer boredom.</p><p>So in the end, it takes a while to find something that fits. Johnny’s Firebird is smoking hotrod of a car, a babe magnet, sex on wheels. Miyagi’s yellow heirloom is its own kind of admirable, with a lot of love and respect under that hood. Their new family-friendly Honda Civic is a frankly nostalgic foray into the world of beige.</p><p>They both do a test drive and independently each declare it ‘fine’. Johnny then cross-examines the guy at the dealership, consulting every item on a list of safety features he copied down from GeoCities about preparing to bring your new baby home. Daniel gives him this strange, constipated look the whole time. Later, parked in their driveway, he reaches past Johnny to click the lock down on the door and then leans down across the centre console.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>As soon as they learned it was a boy, Shannon had wanted the baby to be named Robert after her grandfather. Johnny wasn’t sold on it, but after she damn-near dislocates his hand three times during her fifteen hours of labour he’s willing to cede ground. He is put in charge of filling out the father’s portion of the birth certificate. Daniel walks in with two styrofoam cups of shitty hospital canteen coffee and almost tackles him to the floor to stop him completing the rest of the ‘Swayz<em>-</em>’ that he had started writing in the <em>Middle Name(s) </em>box.</p><p>Shannon nurses their newborn son and watches with cheerful bemusement as Daniel launches into an elaborate argument to justify why ‘Dylan’ was an acceptable alternative that <em>clearly</em> had the pop-culture touch that Johnny evidently wanted while also being a perfectly normal given name that wouldn’t haunt his teenage years and lead him to get bullied in school and have no friends and, <em>honestly</em>, John, no son of mine, <em>etcetera etcetera</em>. He goes so far as to cite specific records from the man’s discography. Johnny actually wrote ‘Dylan’ in the box like ten seconds after Daniel started talking - making direct eye contact with Shannon while he did so and even holding up the clipboard and pointing at it with the end of the pen - but just lets him steamroll on anyway. He enjoys it. It’s like when you pretend to throw a ball for a dog.</p><p>The next day, they carry baby Robert to the beigemobile with the level of caution usually applied to a live bomb. He’s still asleep in his little carrier when Johnny sets him down on the coffee table and joins Daniel on the couch. They then both proceed to sit in the exact same way, palms pressed together between clenched knees, and stare at him like he’s the world’s most beautiful and fascinating work of art.</p><p>Because he is.</p><p>“I didn’t think he’d be so <em>small</em>,” whispers Daniel, reverential.</p><p>At the same volume, Johnny instructs. “Look at his fingernails.” They’re completely perfectly formed yet they’re each about the size of a mini M&amp;M. His kid is such a pipsqueak.</p><p>Robert makes a little gummy motion with his mouth. The two adults in the room gasp like this is the most exciting demonstration a human being has ever performed.</p><p>Rest of the day Robert doesn’t do anything - just naps, wakes up and mewls like a cat until someone provides him a bottle, then naps again - but they can’t stop hovering. Daniel exhausts himself within the first few hours just vibrating care all over everything. The time at which they’d normally head for bed, and at which most of the parenting books that Daniel checked out from the library suggest the fun and games really begin, comes and passes. They end up splayed out on top of the covers. Robert is asleep on Johnny’s chest.</p><p>“We should have another kid,” Johnny announces towards the ceiling. Daniel retrieves his face from the pillows to shoot him a disbelieving look. He elaborates. “What? We’re kickass at this.”</p><p>“Slow down hotshot, it’s been 48 hours.“</p><p>“If we haven’t killed him in the next two days, will you think about it?”</p><p>“Sure,” Daniel promises, lying through his teeth.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>Samantha is born a year and a half later.</p><p>Daniel meets Amanda through some local entrepreneurs group; she’s got a business degree, a pool arm that trounces everyone on networking socials, and a serious girlfriend who she’d like to have a child with in the future.</p><p>They come to an arrangement. Johnny repeatedly offers out a free pass for knocking up a lady the old fashioned way since he still feels kinda bad about already having cashed his in, but since they’re hoping to ice half of this whole project Daniel makes a more clinical sort of contribution, and a couple of months after that they’re at Amanda’s first scan watching a little wiggly shape the doctor assures them is their child.</p><p>“Huh,” says Johnny at the shadow. “Looks like a peanut.”</p><p>Carmen leans over his shoulder. She points at the screen. “Nah, I see a dachshund.”</p><p>“Great,” offers Amanda from the bed. “My womb the Rorschach test.”</p><p>Johnny looks at Carmen, curiously. “What’s Miguel think about having a brother or sister one day?”</p><p>“He’s seven months old so I guess he thinks about milk, mostly. What about Robby?”</p><p>“Oh yeah, same. But for apple slices.”</p><p>After the appointment, they go to the <em>Applebees </em>across the street. It’s ten thirty in the morning. Johnny gets a beer, Carmen and Daniel get mojitos, and Amanda gets herself some palpable envy and also a sparkling water.</p><p>Over the sound of someone having a birthday party in the next booth over, they shoot the shit. Amanda’s rad, obviously, but Carmen is basically the coolest woman Johnny has ever met. In another universe, he thinks, they’d bang. In this one, he lets Daniel hook his dweeby polished Oxfords around his ankle and listens enraptured as she explains how she gets infant vomit out of her couch cushions.</p><p>After, they pick Robby up from Johnny’s mom. She’s back on her feet but still looks like a strong wind could blow her over. Johnny feels bad at even having her on the babysitting rotation, but Daniel had relayed a moment where Laura took him aside while Johnny was using the bathroom and asked <em>please</em> and <em>let me do this </em>and <em>let me feel useful</em>. Chemo, double mastectomy and then the better part of a year on the good drugs yet she still hoists Robby up against her chest when he toddles towards her with little grabby hands.</p><p>Back when she was out of surgery but not out of anaesthesia it had been just him and Sid in an echoing hospital hallway.</p><p>“I’m paying for it,” Sid had announced, face inscrutable, “and then we’re done.”</p><p>The shine had finally come off his trophy and it was because she had fucking cancer, apparently. In that moment Johnny had felt serenely and icily calm. Zen, even. Turns out there’s something peaceful about the realisation that you genuinely wish death on another human being. That you want to take the easy-wipe plastic chair you’re sat on and beat a man with it until his skull caves in.</p><p>She goes back to her maiden name, her maiden-maiden name, and it suits her. There was a prenup, but Laura got enough from the divorce to buy a nice little condo outright. They actually see her more, now, which is nice. At family dinner she mentions looking at maybe taking some classes, retraining in something. Miyagi offers to teach her how to wax cars or paint fences, and Daniel nearly chokes on his salmon he starts laughing so hard.</p><p>After, Laura and both LaRusso’s gravitate to the coffee maker. For his last birthday, Johnny took Daniel to <em>Williams Sonoma </em>and told him he could have anything he wanted. Johnny has never seen a grown man look so pathetically torn between an espresso machine and a <em>Le Creuset </em>dutch oven. Johnny has also probably never gotten fucked so good as he did that night after he told LaRusso to just go ahead and get both, so maybe people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.</p><p>Johnny escapes. Miyagi finds him on the fire escape.</p><p>There’ve been three father figures in Johnny’s life, and he’s his favourite by a country mile given chiefly that he’s the only one who would prefer that Johnny not be dead. He looks curiously at the neck of the saké bottle dangling between Johnny’s middle and index fingers. The bottle is a real expensive one that they both know for a fact that Daniel was saving for a special occasion. “Never used drink this.”</p><p>“I still don’t.” Their cocktail cabinet was devoid of options. It was this or the cooking wine. “Give me a break. I have two kids. ”</p><p>Miyagi extends his arm and pours his still-steaming coffee away. Then he turns the arm towards Johnny, palm up with his empty espresso cup balanced in the middle, and makes a little <em>gimme </em>motion with his fingertips.</p><p>“Wha -” Johnny starts, then his mouth connects to his brain. He takes in the old man’s recreation of Johnny's pleading face. “Why<em>?</em>”</p><p>“Two grandchildren.”</p><p>Johnny pours into his cup using both hands. He taps the lip of the bottle against the cup before he takes his own next swig. Miyagi’s expression fades into contentment, smile pushing his cheeks high on his face.</p><p>The air is cold; the sun’s gone, and summer is turning to autumn again.</p><p>They drink in silence until there’s movement at the window.</p><p>Johnny and Miyagi make frantic eye contact and in an unpracticed yet perfect act of mutually assured destruction attempt to shove their respective drinking vessels into each other’s arms.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>“Gotta admit,” remarks Johnny, holding the sheet of printer paper through which their landlord has just distributed the information that their building is being sold for renovation and they all need to move out. “Shit’s kinda poetic.”</p><p>“Again!?” is Daniel’s contribution, at volume. “Fucking <em>again</em>!?”</p><p>There’s one way not to get kicked out your house, and that’s to own your damn house.</p><p>Their budget is decidedly not huge - the combined income of a jumped-up mechanic and what the City of Los Angeles<em> Office of Finance</em> deigns to record as a ‘self-employed florist’ is underwhelming to say the least - until Lucille reminds them that Daniel’s old college fund is still there and has actually been gathering interest for the better part of thirty years. Then it’s better. Not great, but better.</p><p>Now they can afford, like. A yard.</p><p>Johnny had always thought that Daniel was remarkably relaxed when they’d viewed apartments in the past, at least for someone who could start a fight in an empty room. Turns out this whole time he was banking credit for this inevitable shit-show. He gets sniffy as a show poodle about crap like the woodgrain on the flooring and what direction light comes into the bathroom. One time he walked them out of a viewing halfway through the agent’s spiel about the crown molding because it turned out the doors weren’t fire resistant to the latest OSHA standards. They go through realtors at an average rate of about three a week.</p><p>Johnny just wants a house in a good school district, which it turns out is now the kind thing that he cares about.</p><p>On their first day of being homeowners they pick up the keys, ceremonially fistfight for threshold-carrying duty and immediately set to work blocking off all the electrical wall sockets and padding every sharp corner in the place. On day two they move half their furniture in, cave and pay a removal firm to move the other half, and then sit on Daniel’s prized parquet hardwood to eat shitty delivery sushi because they can’t figure out which bubble-wrapped shape contains chairs. By the dawn of the third day Daniel has hung up all his pots on a little rack across the stove, ‘lost’ Johnny’s beer bottle key dish, and has begun inviting every living human they have ever met over to see the place.</p><p>The most important audience is the kids, who go absolutely fucking nuts. Robby runs around the front lawn in circles until he’s so tired he throws up. After they wipe him down he takes Sam’s hand and toddles her slowly round the circuit he’d just mown neatly into the grass.</p><p>They each get a bedroom to themselves, so a few weeks later Johnny takes a day and wheels them both round Home Depot holding up paint chips ’til they point and squeak approvingly. Robby decides on <em>Pineapple Cream</em> while Sam opts for <em>Melon Ball</em>, both of which sound delicious. Maybe that’s why they picked them. Fun challenge of parenting no one warns you about is trying to convince your kids not to eat paint.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>“You’re a Cobra Kai,” Johnny whispers. “That means you’re not a loser. You’re a winner. You’re badass. You gotta <em>fight</em>. You gotta <em>annihilate </em>your enemy.”</p><p>He feels a presence at his shoulder.</p><p>“Coaching the squirrels, huh?”</p><p>Johnny gestures at the window, urgent. As if on cue, the little rat slides right back down the bird feeder pole.</p><p>“They could do it if they weren’t such pussies!”</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>From the back storeroom, Johnny hears the unmistakable sound of his child making a high-speed collision with the floor. He doesn’t bother to get up. Miyagi’s got this one handled; they’re ‘training’.</p><p>It’s not actually really anything of the kind, it’s LaRusso’s style of waving your arms about non-confrontationally. Robby loves it though. From the first day Miyagi pulled out his healing clap hands thing on a skinned knee, he was hooked. Or maybe it was even before that. Now that he thinks about it, the first time that Robby ever laughed was when Miyagi pretended to honk his nose.</p><p>Soon as he got old enough to stand Robby tuned into Miyagi’s frequency effortlessly, just like Daniel did. Breath, balance, all that bullshit. They found the same station on karate radio and now he’s got his own little mini-me. For what it’s worth, Sam seems to vibe more with what Johnny was taught. They get a call from her kindergarten teacher one time because someone stole her plastic ponies and she responded by stomping on the kids’ instep so hard they cried. Personally, Johnny doesn’t feel this violates the self-defence-only ethos that he is forced to preach. They were <em>her </em>ponies.</p><p>Right now, Sam is settled on his lap. Everyone with important jobs seems to get federal holidays off, but he works in retail so just like clockwork here he is anyway. She keeps reaching for the tree he’s working on and trying to tear leaves off the branches or tug them out of shape. He gives her the rubber ball out of the computer mouse to play with and she immediately puts it in her mouth.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>It is a few weeks before Robby’s six birthday when Amanda lets them know she’s going to use up her half of their frozen spawn. More of said spawn decide to take up residence than they expect.</p><p>“Would you and Johnny be interested in having another child? Twins would be a bit too much for us, if we can’t avoid it,” is how she pitches it to Daniel.</p><p>“You guys want to knock me up again,” is the exact wording she uses on Johnny.</p><p>The problem is that Robby was an excellent baby, who as a people-pleaser from day one never cried and always slept straight through the night, and then Sam was a ray of sunshine that more than made up for her colicy moments.</p><p>Anthony, though.</p><p>“I’m gonna be honest,” states Johnny at 3am. “I don’t like our son very much.”</p><p>Daniel, bouncing the baby around the room against his chest, rearranges his hands to cover the ears. “Don’t say that!”</p><p>“You were thinking it!</p><p>“Yeah but you can’t say it in front of him! It’ll damage him!”</p><p>Johnny tries to look unimpressed. “LaRusso he can’t hold his head up yet. If I scar him this early it’s just natural selection.”</p><p>Sam announces that the baby is loud and annoying - a sentiment that Johnny shares but is strongly discouraged from endorsing verbally - but Robby adores him instantly. At the hospital he crawls up beside Amanda and sits in silent rapture as she gently places one of two squirming bundles into his lap. When they bring Anthony home, he stares into the bassinet and lets him grasp his tiny hand around one pointed finger.</p><p>“Hey, champ,” Johnny says, hoisting Robby up onto his hip. His back protests. Shit, he’s getting old. “You excited to have someone to play cars with?”</p><p>Robby tears his gaze away from where Anthony is trying to shove his own fist into his mouth and frowns at Johnny. “I already do that with Sam.”</p><p>Sam likes cars. He didn’t know Sam likes cars. Shit, is he giving his daughter a complex? This feels like something Carmen should yell at him about.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>“Man, this is so embarrassing.”</p><p>“You don’t have to wear it.”</p><p>“Fuck you. I’m wearing it,” Johnny declares, hoisting the shoulder straps on the papoose higher.</p><p>Daniel’s satisfied expression suggests this exchange went exactly as he intended it to.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>“Johnny. Johnny wake up.”</p><p>He tries to form the words <em>go back to sleep</em>. Instead, it gets lost in the brain tubes and comes out sounding something more like, “guuurlp.”</p><p>“Johnny - what if we’re bad at sex?”</p><p>That makes Johnny turn over. He makes a face that he hopes conveys that his incredibly tired pride has managed to sum up enough energy to be wounded.</p><p>Daniel continues. “I mean it. What if we’re bad at sex. The implications of only ever sleeping with you. I have no frame of reference.” There’s a beat of silence. “I should call Shannon.”</p><p>“Can’t explain how much you should not do that.”</p><p>Judgement delivered, Johnny closes his eyes. Rolls back into his spot and curls his hand back around the pillow. Feels himself drifting back off.</p><p>“<em>John</em>, what if your dick looks super weird and I’ve <em>never realized</em>.”</p><p>He deserves the pillow to the face for that one.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>It’s the goddamn Cold War. Every year for the last five years, the Braithwaites on the other side of the street have put up a stupidly insane amount of holiday decorations. It’s inevitably as if not <em>more</em> neon and gaudy than the Las Vegas strip, it shines directly into their front room, and then at the summer cookouts everyone on the block has the audacity to fall over themselves to congratulate and compliment them. <em>Oooh</em>, <em>how wonderful, </em>and, <em>oh, aren’t they simply the highlight of the area.</em> Not anymore. Not this year. This year is his year. So Johnny is up the stepladder; line of lights trailing, duck tape in hand, and Robby stood twenty foot back shouting <em>left </em>or <em>right </em>at him.</p><p>There’s a crunchy sound, like when you scuff your shoe, then Johnny doesn’t hear anything for a while.</p><p>He sure feels a lot. One of his arms, the left one, must be on fire. Should do something about that. And there are probably, almost definitely sounds happening. That seems likely. But he can’t pick anything out, nothing sticking out of the swimming auditory soup.</p><p>Until he hears, “Robby, Robby go get your sister.”</p><p>Then, after that, “Wait with the baby, okay? Good girl.”</p><p>And then, “Come on, sweetheart,” and, “Show me those baby blues,” and, “You gott- you’re gonna be fine,” and, “You’re gonna be okay,” and, “I need -,” and, “Stay with me,” and, “Please.”</p><p>Eventually, Johnny opens his eyes. It takes a couple of tries.</p><p>“Ow.”</p><p>It feels like the right thing to say, in the moment.</p><p>Through the blur and the spinning Daniel’s face just <em>crumples</em>. There’s snot all up under his nose that he smooshes with the heel of one hand, wet rings around his eyes. Gotta fix that. Johnny goes to sit up. Immediately, Daniel plants a hand on his shoulder and holds him down with a force that would be really hot were he in even slightly less pain.</p><p>He brushes the hair back off Johnny’s forehead. Then he does it again, and again. Feels nice.</p><p>“You’re gonna be fine,” Daniel says again, like he’s talking to himself at this point. “The ambulance is on its way.”</p><p><em>Jesus</em>, Johnny thinks. “Don’t have the money for that.”</p><p>“Of course we don’t! But you fell eight foot and bounced your fucking head off the concrete!”</p><p>“Should be glad it’s so dense.” Johnny tries to lighten the tone. Daniel immediately looks like he’s about to start crying again, so he’d venture that he didn’t do a great job.</p><p>The paramedics put him on a backboard which is, in a word, humiliating. Daniel rides with him in the ambulance, clutching his hand between two of his own and fielding questions about his medical history that Johnny straight up would not be able to answer to if you held a gun on him.</p><p>“His blood type is B-positive,” Daniel says.</p><p>“Hah hah,” Johnny announces. He feels drunk. He can tell he’s slurring his words a bit so tries real hard to make sure all the syllables come out on their own. “Same as my bra size.” He then hears Daniel try to talk the paramedics out of adding <em>delirium </em>to his list of symptoms on the value that he’s genuinely just like that most of the time.</p><p>He gets a CT scan to check for swelling in his brain, a nice white cast for his arm, a little cup of shitty no-pulp orange juice that he immediately revisits because it turns out nausea is a common symptom of mild to moderate traumatic brain injuries, and then another CT scan, just to be sure.</p><p>Carmen comes to find him on her break, sits with him while Daniel calls his mom and gets her to rescue the kids from the fucking Braithwaites. Then he calls Johnny’s mom, and Miyagi, and by the time visiting hours are over he’s got four people by his bed all lecturing him about how you need to ensure the hooks of the ladder are latched on to the guttering. No one even laughs at his hilarious <em>TBI Fridays </em>joke.</p><p>The hospital want to keep him overnight for monitoring - he seems okay, but apparently losing consciousness is what his doctor terms a ‘point of concern’ - so Johnny lays there not sleeping. His skull still hurts and the room is weirdly bright even though the lights are off. Instead he listens to the beeping of machines. There’s different kinds of beeping, he quickly figures out. There’s the regular, <em>still on, still working </em>beeping. You can get used to those. Every so often, though, there’s what he comes to call the <em>oh shit </em>beeping which means that something bad is happening and usually precedes a nurse jogging across the room.</p><p>Breakfast arrives like it does on an airplane; placed in front of your dehydrated, semi-comatose body whether you want it or not. He eats his little fruit cup and ignores the bowl of what is probably oatmeal but looks more like the stuff he uses to fill the gaps between their loft insulation.</p><p>His head is fine in a few days - some lingering dizziness but honestly, getting to sleep in his own bed and reassure his kids that he’s not dead yet did wonders - but the cast presents a problem. It has to be wrapped in a plastic carrier bag every time he wants a shower which is a total ball-ache, until the time he comes up with the genius workaround of having a bath instead.</p><p>Only, once he gets in it occurs to him that he can’t exactly get <em>out </em>again, so that’s how Daniel finds him three hours later.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>Miyagi dies in November, on a bright and sunny day that doesn’t even have the decency to rain.</p><p>It’s sudden. Heart attack. The call comes from the lady who went round every other morning to clean. Says he was laid out there on the kitchen floor, cereal half-poured into the bowl. He never pressed his <em>Life Alert</em> - and he wasn’t shy about it, every time he had to test it he’d keep the operator on the phone for an hour giving the guy life advice - so he probably didn’t suffer. Some shitty consolation prize that is.</p><p>Daniel puts on a brave face but it hits him. That first night he curls into Johnny and doesn’t acknowledge he’s crying, just makes these shakey silent sobs that are objectively speaking at least a thousand times worse. Johnny doesn’t want to acknowledge he’s doing it either, doesn’t want to make it real, just puts his arm round him and holds.</p><p>Not to mention that the kids don’t handle it great, death some foreign thing reserved for TV and movies and other people’s families. In hindsight they probably should have gotten a hamster before now. Anthony picks up on the atmosphere like a little psychic weirdo and stops sleeping through the night again, and Sam mostly just gets real quiet, but Robby. Robby gets <em>angry</em>. He acts out and he won’t let them hold him, brushes off Daniel’s hand every time he reaches for his shoulder. And it hurts<em>, fuck</em> does it hurt, to see his soft and kind little boy all twisted up.</p><p>Daniel is already a big ball of sadness in a human suit so when Robby decides that he doesn’t want to go to school and elects to inform them of this by yelling that he hates them and wishes they were the ones that died, Johnny puts him in the Firebird and drives to the ice cream shop where he and Ali used to go in junior high (it was an ice cream place, then a pyramid scheme smoothie shop, then a vape store, and now it’s a ice cream place again only it sells flavours like turmeric and coconut matcha) and pours cookies ’n cream down his gullet until he’ll form words that aren’t swears.</p><p>After that, the next tactic is distraction.</p><p>Johnny is sat criss-cross applesauce in the driveway, screwing a set of stabilizer wheels together. He’d been doing it crouched down until it turned out that his kneecaps just didn’t like to do that anymore. Fuck his forties, honestly.</p><p>A shadow moves into view, blocking out the sun.</p><p>“You’re teaching Anthony how to ride a bike.” It’s a statement, not a question.</p><p>“I did it before.”</p><p>“And that was such an unqualified success.” Robby has his skateboard. Sam loves her rollerskates. The use of a bicycle is notable only by its absence.</p><p>Johnny shrugs. “Well now I’ve had a run at it.”</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>It’s their first whole family meal since the funeral. Slightly less whole than it used to be, he supposes. These get togethers never happened all that often, too difficult to get everyone in one place at one time for reasons that now seem half-assed. At first it feels weird, then it feels kinda normal, then it feels weird because it feels kinda normal. This just leads to a sit-down dinner party with an uncomfortable atmosphere and unsettlingly high stakes. Johnny keeps waiting for the murder mystery to happen.</p><p>The kids black out earlier than their normal bedtime, but that’s fair. Miguel got heelys for his birthday and flagrantly if understandably spent the whole night disrespecting their <em>no shoes in the house</em> rule. Johnny and Carmen excuse themselves from the table to put them down for the night, Sophia folding up in Sam’s bed and Miguel top-and-tailing with Robby. When he gets back, Daniel is trying to wrestle control of dishwasher loading away from his mother.</p><p>All in all it’s possibly the most stressful experience of Johnny’s life. But it was nice enough and most importantly it is also now <em>over</em>, which deserves something special in commemoration. While Daniel is busy supervising the tetris of getting everyone’s cars off the driveway, Johnny carves out a moment of peace. He sits back on the couch, legs splayed. The playlist the kids made full of hip-hop crap is still rolling out the iPod dock in the corner of the room.</p><p>Daniel walks back in a couple of minutes later and freezes when he sees the joint.</p><p>“Shit.” He questions, awe palpable. “Where’d you get that?”</p><p>“Carmen’s mom.”</p><p>“Damn.” He plucks it from Johnny’s fingers, takes a hit that hollows his cheeks. Watching, Johnny moves his palm to rest on the front of his jeans. “Ravi at the garage won’t sell to me anymore since I told him the paint-matching on the Buick we got in last year looked like he did it in the dark.”</p><p>“Oh yeah babe,” says Johnny, goading. “Talk dirty to me.”</p><p>Daniel takes the bait. He plants himself across Johnny’s lap and sits back on his heels.</p><p>“Came in super faded,” he says. “Was supposed to be metallic mint green.”</p><p>“Uh huh.” Johnny is totally listening. To prove it he runs his hands up the tight muscle of Daniel’s thighs, rests his fingers in the fold below the meat of his ass.</p><p>“Meant to be a total rush job, the guy was off on vacation the next day.”</p><p>“Go on,” he offers and squeezes encouragingly. Daniel hisses.</p><p>“Alabama or somewhere.” He takes another drag and leans down to shotgun the exhale into Johnny’s mouth. Their lips move against each other.</p><p>When he goes to pull away Johnny follows, chasing the kiss. Looks up at him slow. He feels himself blink. “That so.” His heart is beating sluggish, like it’s having to work extra hard to pump all this love.</p><p>Without moving off, Daniel twists and reaches behind himself for one of the coasters on the coffee table. He uses it to tap the joint out real gentle, puts it to one side, then blows the ash off the coaster before placing it delicately back in the little stack with the rest of them. The combination of that little bit of fastidious bullshit plus the friction against his crotch is enough to get Johnny hard.</p><p>Johnny sticks his hand up the back of Daniel’s shirt to palm the blades of his shoulders. The skin is soft and hot. He uses this hold to tug him down, forcing his legs to spread wider, until their chests are flush. Daniel gets to work on his throat.</p><p>“So what happened?” asks Johnny, since his mouth is free.</p><p>There’s a soft enquiring <em>hmm</em> that buzzes against his skin.</p><p>Johnny elaborates. “With the car?”</p><p>Daniel sits back up. He stares at him, wide-eyed and innocent despite the crow’s feet. Same as always. Same as that first time the whole world melted away and left just the two of them. Johnny had looked at this little Jersey punk and thought, <em>this is gonna be good, </em>and Daniel had looked back at him just like this, like Johnny was never gonna stop being the death of him.</p><p>And that’s a fucking promise.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>June in LA makes you wish for death. Every summer Johnny quips that he knew he was going to hell but was surprised they turned the fire on this early, and every summer Daniel doesn’t laugh. Joke is on him, though - Johnny’s the one in the shop today, sat directly underneath the AC unit.</p><p>The phone rings.</p><p>“Hey, this is <em>Miyag</em>-“</p><p>“Dad!” Sam has lost what is possibly her last baby tooth but it’s a doozy - dead center, on the bottom. She doesn’t so much as have a lisp as there is just a whoosing sound like an open window accompanying everything she says. “Turn on the news! Prop 8! The Court, they did it!”</p><p>Johnny finishes his day calmly. Sells a badass little palm and one of their top-shelf red maples. At 5:30pm he locks up, gets into the Firebird and drives ten miles per hour over the speed limit all the way home. He stops at the <em>7/11</em> just around the corner to buy a bunch of flowers, and when he puts them on the counter beside some Red Vines the kid with the nose ring behind the register gives him a knowing look.</p><p>“What do you say, LaRusso,” he shouts down the hallway the second he opens the front door. “Wanna make an honest man out of me?”</p><p>He gets slide tackled to the floor.</p><p>“Do you want to hyphenate?” Daniel asks later.</p><p>Johnny frowns around his toothbrush, furrowed eyebrows reflecting in the bathroom mirror. He spits, then sticks his head around the door. “I thought me and Robby were taking your name.”</p><p>He gets a blank look in return. “Did we already have this conversation?”</p><p>No, apparently Johnny just had it in his head. His subconscious has been writing <em>Mr. Johnny LaRusso</em> in its little notebook when he’s not been paying attention.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>“I know that face.”</p><p>Amanda makes a serene little <em>hmm?</em> sound as she slowly draws the cake fork out of her mouth. She’s wearing a floaty gold dress and could easily pass for one of the Greek goddesses.</p><p>Johnny isn’t fooled. “If you propose during his wedding reception Daniel will quite genuinely kill you dead.”</p><p>She waves with the fork, dismissive. “It’s your wedding too.”</p><p>“I used the word ‘goddamn’ in my vows.” It was in front of the altar. Out the corner of his eye he saw Bobby physically flinch. “Don’t think anyone will mistake me for a traditionalist.”</p><p>Miguel appears out of nowhere to run bodily into Amanda’s side. Probably going to be some similar sugar highs to bring down in Johnny’s future.</p><p>“Hey, squirt.”</p><p>Through frosting-covered teeth, Miguel grins. “I got told to tell you that it’s dance time.”</p><p>Johnny knocks back the rest of his champagne. “Duty calls.” He stands, straightens his tie and adjusts his boutonnière. Powder blue, like the ruffles LaRusso was wearing the night they first kissed. He may not be a traditionalist but he sure is a sentimentalist.</p><p>“Get the floor good and ready for the rest of us, alright?” Amanda moves her purse, which earlier she conspiratorially opened to reveal the sets of flats origami’d to fit inside, off of her knee and replaces it with her son. “What’re you using?”</p><p>Chuck Berry was a late runner, but the bridezilla had his way. “Speedwagon.”</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>He keeps his cell phone in his pocket all day, carries it to the bathroom and balances it precariously on the edge of the sink. When he gets home Johnny plugs it into the wall straight away, keeps poking it every time he walks past just to make sure it’s still on and not silenced and that it’s getting enough battery.</p><p>At one point it rings and he bodily leaps to answer. Slides the button thing across on the third try. Turns out he’s been involved in an accident that wasn’t his fault. After that he decides to just stand in the kitchen by the socket for a bit because what if someone actually called while he was busy getting scam called and he missed it? What if they try to call back? He’ll just wait it out. Better safe than sorry. He taps his wedding ring against the edge of the sink. He keeps tapping it, anxious.</p><p>The rhythmic sound of someone lowering their property values summons Daniel from the ether because after a couple of minutes of this the front door opens.</p><p>At least, it better be Daniel. The house is otherwise empty. Anthony is with Carmen and Amanda, visiting the latter’s mom in Austin for his and Sophia’s eighth birthday. Sam and Robby are at sleepaway camp, space and gymnastics respectively.</p><p>Daniel sticks his cold nose behind Johnny’s ear. Drops a toolbag by his feet. Snakes his arms around his middle.</p><p>“They’re gonna be fine.”</p><p>“Know they’re gonna be fine.” Johnny doesn’t know this in the slightest. His brain is playing a never ending loop of the time Robby and Anthony got trapped on the broken down log flume at Disneyland that constituted the longest twenty-five minutes of Johnny’s life. His grip on the edge of the sink tightens. “I’m worried about me.”</p><p>“Oh yeah?”</p><p>“No one else to nag about the dishwasher, you’re gonna kill me in two days.”</p><p>The arms around his waist go sinuous. One runs up across his chest while the other heads south. “Or I could go the other route.”</p><p>Johnny breathes in deep through his nose. “A girl could get the wrong idea.”</p><p>There’s a little puff of air, a snort into the back of his neck. “Oh yeah, me and our three kids. Only after one thing.”</p><p>“First time with the house all to ourselves…” Johnny trails off, voice going all sing-song. He shifts his ass side to side. “You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?”</p><p>“I was considering putting two fingers in you then taking a nap.”</p><p>He drops his head, letting it fall heavy between his shoulders. It’s a good thing LaRusso can’t see his face. Gotta try to preserve the illusion that he’s not always going to be so easy. “Other way round. Got about fourteen years worth of sleep to catch up on.”</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>Johnny wakes up early for the unenviable purpose of doing the tax return. It’s been looming, a big ugly post-it labelled ‘FY15/16’ stuck up in the shop’s back room which someone adds another exclamation point to every week. Today is the deadline and he knows he shouldn’t have left it so late, get off his back, okay, but there’s important facts to consider like how he just really didn’t want to. It’s still dark out. He spends ten long minutes at the machine repeatedly mashing the espresso button in the hope it spits out some will to live alongside the coffee.</p><p>By the time he makes it to the cupboard constituting the home office, someone has stolen his seat.</p><p>Daniel is squinting at the screen, the only source of light in the room. He’s still sleep-rumpled, rockin’ his favourite pajama set; one of Johnny’s old <em>All Valley Tournament First Aid </em>t-shirts and a pair of those stupidly expensive lounge pants that they won’t shut up about on every single podcast Robby makes him play in the car.</p><p>“Are you on the <em>Yankee Candle</em> website again?”</p><p>He doesn’t fucking blink. Eyes still on the prize. “It’s for Carmen.”</p><p>“I know it’s for Carmen, you hate those things.” Johnny pauses, then reflects on what he just said. “Apart from that one you said smelled like the cabin we went to on our anniversary.”</p><p>“That was a moment of vulnerability and it’s a dick move to keep bringing it up.”</p><p>“I know they ‘drop’ when she’s on shift,” he ventures, making the air quotes with his hands. “But can’t she just buy them herself? They do restock later.” Johnny checked after the incident the last time.</p><p>Finally tearing his eyes off the monitor, Daniel glares at him. Never stops being impressive how much challenge he can pack into the action. “I need the rush, John. It makes me feel alive.”</p><p>He gives him the coffee, leaving it at his elbow, and goes to make another.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>“Have you followed Shannon?” Sam asks one day. They’re waiting in the line at the boba place. “And liked her selfies?”</p><p>“Uuuuuh,” says Johnny. Then he ventures, “I mean, me and your father are pretty happy, so…?”</p><p>Sam shoves her phone under his nose. Apparently what this sentence means is that she posts her makeup pictures onto some app thing.</p><p>“Cool,” he offers. Those numbers do seem pretty big, but honestly Johnny still thought the coolest shit was the when she did the makeup on set for that one <em>Star Trek </em>movie.</p><p>The barista - a greying guy with a badge on his apron that reads <em>Tom :) - </em>slides their order along the counter. Johnny, who also suffers the indignity of working in customer service in his fifties but at least gets to own his shop, drops a $5 bill into his tip cup.</p><p>Generally speaking though, Johnny is completely comfortable being the person who understands the least about technology in his household, and that includes his ten year-old. It’s all a fad anyway. They just don’t make things like they used to, and the classics are the best. That said it does lead to being blindsided on occasion. Like how one day Daniel announces that their ex-girlfriend friended him on face book.</p><p>“I understand all those words individually,” he admits, before said ten year-old deigns to explain it to him.</p><p>Ali grew up to be a doctor (which is cool as fuck), and she has kids (which Johnny can attest is an exercise in new forms of frustration and joy every day), and she’s hyphenated her last name (which Johnny can once again be gratified he didn’t do because wow, her’s <em>sucks</em>). She’s going to be in town to visit her family over the holidays, and wonders if they all wanted to catch up. She suggests this nice Greek place in Encino, which they have to decline because they actually went there a few years ago and Daniel got into such a strongly worded discussion about what constitutes good service when the waiter got their order wrong for a third time that now they’re not allowed back.</p><p>Instead they find a burger place that hasn’t changed much since they were kids. Laminated tabletops, paper napkins, plastic cutlery. When their food comes, Ali eats the pickle on her burger while Daniel retrieves his and passes it to Johnny. This, he considers, is probably why they’re the couple at this table who lasted.</p><p>“When I made an account I decided to look you up. I wasn’t going to bother you - I didn’t want it to be weird,” she assures Daniel, as if that ship hasn’t long since sailed. “But then I saw you got married. To each other.”</p><p>“The old ball and chain,” Johnny confirms.</p><p>They reminisce. It’s nice, nice to see her so well and so happy. At the tail end of a story about something embarrassing she and Suzie used to do, Ali dabs delicately at the corner her eyes. “God, what a walk down memory lane. Nice visit to the past but, <em>geeze</em>, you wouldn’t want to live there.”</p><p>Johnny’s living in the city he grew up in and working the same job he did when he graduated high school. And you know, fair enough. Maybe that’s sad by some people’s standards. Yuk it up. None of that’s ever felt like living in the past to him, though. LaRusso took his hand at eighteen and has dragged him kicking and screaming into a future together every day since.</p><p>Didn’t need to give him his heart. Man fucking took it, stole it like a first-place trophy.</p><p>Continuing this trend, Johnny decides to liberate some of Daniel’s uneaten fries. Daniel swats his hand away. Johnny swats back, pushes through the motion to get his elbow in Daniel’s face, and uses this distraction as a cover to go for <em>more fries.</em></p><p>“Wow,” says Ali at length, watching this play out. “You guys still know how to fight, huh.”</p><p>“<em>Pfft</em>,” Daniel waves a hand. The other one is guarding his tray, sliding side to side like the line of players on a foosball table. “I don’t. He always starts it.”</p><p>Absolute bullshit, of course, but there are important things to address here.</p><p>“Yeah? And I can finish it too.”</p><p>“Oh. Oh, it’s foreplay,” clarifies Ali, in the tone of voice he imagines she uses when diagnosing patients. “That explains a lot, actually.”</p><p>When their tab is paid and they all stand up Daniel pats his back pockets, then his front pockets, then his chest pocket, then his back pockets again. “Hey, can someone call my phone?”</p><p>Johnny does the honors. About five seconds later, the space behind the menus starts singing, asking Betty if Jimmy is picking her up on his motorbike after school today.</p><p>Ali blinks. She smiles, this kind and reedy smile exactly like the one she had when they were seventeen, and Johnny is charmed by the way it makes him feel absolute bupkis.</p><p>He lets the call go to voicemail. “LaRusso, is your ringtone the Shangri-La’s?”</p><p>In spite of all evidence to the contrary, Daniel cheerfully declares that it is not. Then he elaborates, crinkles growing in the crows feet around his eyes. “My ringtone is the one that sounds like a duck quacking. ‘Leader Of The Pack’ is just for you.”</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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</div><p>Sam and Robby are at the table, papers spread out, bickering about some school thing. Miguel sits between them, looking back and forward like a tennis spectator with a big grin on his face. He comes over for dinner on Thursdays, while Sophia is at her dance class. This is so that Carmen and Amanda have a kid-free house in which to have sex, a favor which they return on Monday afternoons. Astonishingly none of the kids seem to have figured out this system yet, despite the fact that last semester Anthony even asked why they were both so upset that his after-school AV Club was cancelled for three weeks.</p><p>Sam, helping to clear the table, later makes an observation in a pleasant, musing tone. “Miguel looked cute today.”</p><p>Everyone in the room promptly freezes.</p><p>“What,” states Daniel.</p><p>Robby’s jaw drops. “Oh my god, you can’t let me have one thing.”</p><p>“<em>What</em>,” states Johnny.</p><p>Anthony scrunches up his nose. “Gross,” he offers, then looks back down at his little game machine.</p><p>Meanwhile, Sam has stuck her tongue out. Johnny is a solid eighty percent sure she got that from him. “I’m your little sister dipshit, what’s yours is mine. I always get your hand-me-downs.”</p><p>Robby’s face goes beet red almost immediately. Cursed and betrayed by his genetics. Sorry bud. “He’s not a hand-me-down! I haven’t asked yet, okay! There’s a plan.”</p><p>“Then what was all that,” she holds her arms out sideways like an ice dancer and puts on a voice, “‘<em>oh, let me just practice my kata shirtless on the front lawn</em>’ stuff last week?”</p><p>“That’s part of the plan!” He elaborates, gesticulating wildly. “There are <em>steps</em>!”</p><p>Johnny tries to diffuse some of the tension here. He turns to Sam. “What about that other boy you mentioned? The jock.” That wasn’t that long ago. Probably.</p><p>Her nose wrinkles. “Ew. That’s dad’s type, not mine.”</p><p>The implication that Daniel ever found Johnny cute in high school is apparently enough to rouse him from the catatonic state he entered when he learned that one or more of their kids wanted to start dating.</p><p>“Honey,” Daniel starts, gentle, like he’s attempting to soothe a bear. “Miguel is family. You don’t want to risk breaking up and then it being awkward, right?” What a rational, well-reasoned argument. Time for Johnny to do his half of this parenting dance and finish hitting the nail in with a sledgehammer.</p><p>“Plus he is, you know. Actual family.”</p><p>Sam puffs up, indignant. She crosses her arms, makes this familiar little frown. “I’m not technically related to him.”</p><p>Hoping to let the doubt in his tone do the heavy lifting, Johnny tries to appeal to her good sense. She’s gotta have some. He wasn’t exclusively responsible for raising her.</p><p>“Eh, if you have to add the <em>technically</em>…”</p><p>“Gross,” Anthony reiterates. Good kid. He gets rewarded with an approving pat on the shoulder.</p><p>Robby sticks up one hand, like he’s arguing a point in class. “I’m less related to him than she is.”</p><p>“<em>Neither</em> of you are dating your cousin!” Daniel states this in the somewhat desperate tone of someone trying to speak it into existence through sheer concentrated force of will.</p><p>Robby and Sam meet each other’s eyes. There is a palpable challenge in that gaze.</p><p>Johnny feels himself age ten years in real time.</p><p>Eventually things diffuse. Sam slinks away to her room, probably to work on her twelve-step master plan. Robby sits down in the corner of the couch with a book. Daniel still looks twitchy, so the real saving grace is when the iPad charging by the fruit bowl makes the <em>whoosh</em> sound that indicates the arrival of the local business digest. It’s the most fascinating fucking thing ever, apparently, because Daniel always stares at the tablet like he can divine the secrets of the universe from whatever informational bulletin the people who pressure-wash their drive have decided to release.</p><p>“They used to print these on paper, you know,” Daniel says absentmindedly while scrolling.</p><p>Johnny is busy trying to help Anthony with his English homework, which is a regular exercise in misery for the both of them. “Uh-huh.”</p><p>“That’s how we met Amanda.”</p><p>“Yeah,” acknowledges Johnny. “I was there.”</p><p>Silence descends. Johnny reaches over and corrects Anthony’s grip on his pen - he might be a whizz-kid with technology but at least Johnny will have taught him how to make words - and ruffles his hair when the kid gets it right the second time. Then Anthony asks a question about verb tenses and Robby volunteers an answer, so Johnny vacates his seat to a more gifted teacher and decides to go clean out all the floaty bits of food that he knows are congealing around the drain in the sink. No one in this house knows how to rinse a plate.</p><p>Daniel makes a disbelieving sound.</p><p>Johnny looks up, makes a face across the island that is correctly interpreted as a request for details.</p><p>“There’s a yoga studio that’s looking to sublet. Get this - ‘s<em>lots are available for rent on a week-by-week basis, and the space has a calming and rejuvenating energy that would best suit other invigorating physical activities.’ </em>Hah<em>.” </em>He chuckles.</p><p>Then he remarks, easy as anything, “You could open a karate dojo.”</p><p>Johnny can only look at his husband like he’s lost his mind. “Why the fuck would I wanna do that?”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This all started as me <a href="https://shortcrust.tumblr.com/post/640859791262171136">just having fun</a> imagining the chaotic neutral squared energy that would emanate from these two if they’d been together since they were teenagers, and turned into a thought experiment on the hypothesis that if I poured thirty years’ worth of Married To Daniel LaRusso Juice into Johnny Lawrence would I get a man who made better choices. Evidence still inconclusive. </p><p>I actually scored this whole fic, soundtrack-to-the-original-motion-picture style. Anything that’s name-dropped, was something I visualised playing in the background of a scene, or that inspired this ‘verse is on <a href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2h5uzjUmbfpQxbGPxmAtFs?si=ed_fW_T3SrmobRk_7N8mvw">this playlist</a>, if you wanted a reading accompaniment! Included is the Noah &amp; The Whale song from which we draw our title: <em>last night I had a dream we were inseparably entwined / like a piece of rope made out of two pieces of vine / held together, holding each other with no one else in mind / like two atoms in a molecule inseparably combined.</em></p><p>Highlights of the writing process for this fic included; a) calculating the likely settlement for a woman with a prenup divorcing a multi-millionaire, and then adjusting for inflation to determine whether this would be enough to buy a condo in LA in 2002 given average regional property prices; b) scouring through Beaniepedia.com, which claims uncontested to be the internet’s most comprehensive online database of Beanie Babies; and c) every time I got to channel the particular energy of Johnny ‘Continues Using The Ranged Area Spell That Is Referring To His Husband By His Last Name, As If That Isn’t Also His Last Name’ LaRusso. </p><p>At age eight I swallowed the marble out of the boardgame <em>Screwball Scramble</em> and I’m still here, so Sam would probably be totally fine.</p><p>Thanks for reading! You can find me (and everything I’ve tagged as <em><a href="https://shortcrust.tumblr.com/tagged/last%20night%20i%20had%20a%20dream/chrono">last night I had a dream</a></em>) on tumblr as <a href="https://shortcrust.tumblr.com/">shortcrust</a>, too.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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